Sidebar 2: System When installing an amplifier of this power, due consideration must be paid to its line supply. Ideally, this should be a dedicated high-current line from the circuit-breaker box. Attention to such detail really matters here.
Throughout the review period, the FPB 600 continued to stretch my ability to take its full measure. In the main, listening was undertaken with Wilson Audio WITTs and WATT/Puppy 5.1s, in order of preference, allied to Quad ESL-63s. For vinyl playback I used a Linn LP12/Lingo/Naim ARO with both a Clearaudio Insider and van den Hul Grasshopper…
Sidebar 3: Measurements When you buy a big, expensive power amplifier, you expect it to deliver. Krell has a tradition of generosity when it comes to power, and their specifications are often some of the most conservative in the business. Having said that, it's common for most conventional amplifiers to have inherent power reserves. With line voltage varying from region to region and country to country, a reserve has to be incorporated to help meet the published spec, regardless of such difficulties.
In theory, this reserve is unnecessary for an amplifier that has regulated…
Wes Phillips wrote about the FPB 600 in January 1998 (Vol.21 No.1): How does a pair of Mark Levinson No.33H monoblocks compare to the Krell Full Power Balanced 600, Stereophile's joint Amplification Product of the Year for 1997? After all, Martin Colloms went so far in his review last April as to claim that the Krell so rewrote the book on amplification as to require a total reexamination of Class A power amplifiers in Stereophile's "Recommended Components." I'm not sure I'd go that far, but Martin is essentially correct: Compared to the Krell, almost everything else sounds broken.
… Please let me explain. Because I've never been especially adept at making lifelong commitments and irrevocable decisions, when it came to naming this new column, Managing Editor Debbie Starr and I decided that we would gather the passionate (and supremely efficient) minds of the Stereophile production staff, add a near–life-threatening amount of margaritas, and put the question to them.
A number of contenders emerged from this entertaining evening: "Tracks, Cracks, and Wax" (too gross); "Gorillas in the Mist" (too hairy); "Smell the Glove" (too Spinal Tap); "No Tongues" (too Madeline Kahn…
"Do you have another DVD player?" asked Classic Records' Michael Hobson. As is usual in important demonstrations, Murphy's Law had struck with a vengeance. The prototype Muse DVD player Kevin Halverson had worked on most of the previous night was refusing to play the DVD Mike had placed in its tray.
"So what?" you're probably thinking. "What's the big deal? DVD is just another video medium awaiting its chance on the stage of consumer success. What's of more concern to Stereophile readers is the long-promised DVD-Audio disc."
However, at the time of writing (Christmas Eve, 1997),…
Remember the old mathematical riddle about moving a football from a hundred yards out to the goal line? Known as Xeno's Paradox, it goes like this: if each time the ball is moved it travels half the distance to the goal, how many moves will it take to get there? The answer: an infinite number, because no matter how many times you cut the distance to the goal by half, you'll always be some infinitesimal distance away from it. We audiofools face just such a riddle in our relentless pursuit of musical realism. I can hear you now: No, say it isn't so. Surely our technology is equal to the…
Lost dimensions
he other probably insurmountable obstacle to audio realism is the fact that there is no vertical information in any of our recordings. That's right. None. You probably haven't given this much thought, but the whole paradigm of recording technology is built on horizontal references: left-center-right, left-rear, right-rear. Any "stage height" we hear is the result of a happy accident---the right music feeding the right loudspeakers in the right room to a listener in the right mood---our brains playing tricks trying to make sense of the interference patterns resulting from…
Critical listening syndrome. . .
. . . is a cluster of reflexive responses and behaviors that occur automatically in an audiophile the instant he or she hears music. The analytical left brain continuously monitors and attempts to dissect and override the emotional responses of the right brain, which desperately needs the exercise and nourishment of unencumbered free association. This internal conflict is a source of unresolved tension in the afflicted audiophile, manifesting itself in a dour attitude and a nitpicking dissatisfaction with almost everything heard. Critical Listening…
One thing I didn't find was the internecine bickering that plagues the hi-fi world. In my few evenings of perusing railroad-buff journals, it looked to me like steam-engine fanciers, their diesel-loving counterparts, and the myriad sects devoted to differing scales accorded each other quite a bit of mutual respect---considerably more than we see in the ongoing analog vs digital, tubes vs transistors, single-ended vs push-pull, two-channel vs surround-sound, high-end vs Home Theater, and subjective vs objective controversies. Of course, I was barely scratching the surface, and probably didn't…
Sony's first flagship Super Audio CD player was the two-channel SCD-1, reviewed by Jonathan Scull in November 1999. (The $5000 SCD-1 had balanced outputs; the cosmetically different but otherwise identical $3500 SCD-777ES had unbalanced outputs and was reviewed by Chip Stern in April 2001.) Sony's second-generation flagship player, the $3000 SCD-XA777ES, was reviewed by Kalman Rubinson in January 2002, and added multichannel capability with channel-level adjustment and bass management. Sony's third-generation flagship is the SCD-XA9000ES, also priced at $3000, which adds time-delay adjustment…
